⚺ Semi-sextile
Sun semi-sextile Pluto
Power that is usable rather than overwhelming. Associated with resilience, with the ability to start again after loss, and with an instinct for what is really going on beneath a situation.
- Angle
- 30°
- Orb used
- ±2°
- Type
- Soft
- Bodies
- ☉ ♇
What these two are about together
Identity and power. The most intense pairing the Sun makes, and the one the tradition reads as being about control, survival and what a person will not let go of.
What a semi-sextile does
A semi-sextile puts two planets in adjacent signs, which share no element, no quality and no polarity. The tradition treats it as the mildest contact in the table and disagrees with itself about whether it is helpful at all: some read it as a small supportive link, others as a low-level irritation between two things that simply do not speak the same language. Both readings agree it is quiet.
How it reads
Power that is usable rather than overwhelming. Associated with resilience, with the ability to start again after loss, and with an instinct for what is really going on beneath a situation.
In practice
Read as a minor note rather than a theme. A semi-sextile is worth mentioning when almost nothing else is in orb, and worth leaving out of a summary when anything major is.
What to watch for
Overreading it. Adjacent signs are genuinely awkward together, but at this strength the tradition does not expect the awkwardness to be conspicuous.
The two planets
Sun: Identity, vitality and what you are becoming
Pluto: Power, compulsion and what will not stay buried
Sun and Pluto at other angles
- Sun conjunction PlutoTwo bodies at the same degree, acting as one
- Sun semi-square PlutoForty-five degrees apart: half a square, and read as half its weight
- Sun sextile PlutoSixty degrees apart: cooperation that has to be taken up
- Sun quintile PlutoSeventy-two degrees apart: a fifth of the circle, and the odd one out
- Sun square PlutoNinety degrees apart: two things that will not sit still together
- Sun trine PlutoA hundred and twenty degrees apart: the same element, working together
- Sun sesquiquadrate PlutoA hundred and thirty-five degrees: a square and a half
- Sun quincunx PlutoA hundred and fifty degrees apart: two things that cannot be compared
- Sun opposition PlutoDirectly across the chart: two ends of one axis
Find this in your own chart
A reading like this only tells you what the pairing is associated with. Whether Sun and Pluto actually make this angle in your chart depends on your birth date, time and place.